Employer Says She's Been Looking For A Year, Can't Find A Soul To Hire

For the country's 12.8 million unemployed, it may seem like the jobs just aren't out there. The average jobless American is out of work, after all, for nine months. But a somewhat different lament is coming, increasingly, from the employer's end: They can't find good enough people to fill all their open jobs.

There's a raging debate over what's going on here. Is it a "skills gap"? Too many bachelor's degrees? Not enough bachelor's degrees? A generation of over-coddled narcissists? AOL Jobs decided to go to one frustrated employer and find out. Meet Kimberly Yasa (pictured above), director of market intelligence at ChemOrbis, which provides marketplace and trend information for the global plastic resin market.

Yasa says that she started hunting to fill an opening over a year ago, a work-from-home job that pays $30,000 to $50,000, depending on experience, but with no benefits (it's an independent contractor position). The only requirements are a four-year college degree and some writing and editing skills, so she thought she'd get a bounty of qualified, eager applicants. She didn't. And she's pointing her finger at one culprit: the Internet.

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Eighty percent of the applications that she's received didn't include a cover letter, she claims, and of the ones with a cover letter, three-quarters of them didn't even mention the position. One applicant even used the wrong company name.

"I do believe that the Internet is causing a vicious circle," she says. "You can too easily hit the send button. So a candidate gets used to sending 100 resumes. Of course they hear nothing back, because they weren't right for the job in the first place. So they don't want to put effort in the next 100 resumes."

"They just want to throw them out there and see what lands," she says.

Yasa's opening is for a junior market analyst at her company, and no work experience is required. "We're looking to train someone from scratch," she says. "They don't have to be from my sector whatsoever. We would turn you into an expert."

But when she posted a paid ad last year on Monster.com she received only 64 responses after a month, and none of them were good enough to hire. So she posted the ad again last week on LinkedIn, and has so far received just 77 applications -- the vast majority of them worthless, she says.

"How many millions of kids graduated this year?" she asks exasperatedly. "How many are out of work? How many want to work from home?"

After going through this experience, Yasa has a few tips for job-seekers who have been sending out their resumes, but getting no bites.

Send a cover letter. "This is basic stuff," she says. "Everybody knows you have to have a cover letter." A cover letter, she says, needs to explain how the person's qualities match the job description. Without that information, she has to do all the work herself of combing a person's resume for the relevant skills. "I need to see how you fit and why you fit and you need to show me," she says. So many people, "just throw out their resume and hope that the company figures it out for them."

Explain why you want the job. Yasa says that she'll receive resumes from people with a background in other sectors, and isn't quite sure why they want to move into her's. "I don't bother to call them," she says. "I need to see their desire to work at this position. I want someone to be happy and enjoy this job and stay with me for a very long time."

Mention the position. So many cover letters, Yasa says, read like copy-and-paste jobs, recycled from a hundred other applications. Job-seekers should at the very least mention the position they're applying for in their cover letters.

Sell your services, not your goal. A lot of applicants, Yasa says, will talk about wanting the job to "better themselves," or "get real world experience," or "improve my skills." And while Yasa wants her employee to be the best they can be, job-hunting is a seller's game. "You can not sell me your betterment," she says. "That's not why I pay you money. I'm not paying you so you can round out your resume."

Yasa is still accepting applications for the job. If interested, you can view the job description and apply here. But don't forget the cover letter.

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Fabio Facchetti

Of course nobody accepted this, it sounds like a scam, and it pratically is since you get no benefits.Also "explain why you want the job" is basically asking me to lie to you - the only reason a person needs a job is to get money, you are delusional if you think people work for anything else.

"Yasa says that she started hunting to fill an opening over a year ago, a work-from-home job that pays $30,000 to $50,000, depending on experience, but with no benefits (it's an independent contractor position)."

Of course nobody accepted this, it sounds like a scam, and it pratically is since you get no benefits.

1. Work from home2. Pays $30,000 to $50,0003. No experience necessary4. Some writing and editing

I see that posted every day on craigslist. They used to post make $250,000 a year but the scammers learned that they have to tailor it back or it is just a give away to everybody. If you mention $30,000 to $50,000, that seems a hell of a lot better than $250,000. If you say anything too high for a no experience job and you are just saying, we don't want to hire you, we want to scam you of any money that you may have because that is how we make money.

If you believe you are going to make this kind of money for writing and editing, then I would like to discuss with you about a ditch digging or bridge building job that you could make $30,000 to $50,000. No experience necessary, Work at home, work whenever you want. Anybody interested.

Ms. Yasa says she'll hire someone with NO EXPERIENCE, and that she'll "Make them an expert", the. Goes on to say that the resumes she received were WORTHLESS.

How about considering the possibility that your hiring skills are worthless. Perhaps the reason why you feel the resumes were worthless was that YOU TOLD PEOPLE YOU'D HIRE THEM WITH NO EXPERIENCE!

You can't offer a job with substandard pay and no benefits to people without experience and expect to get resumes from Ivy League graduates! You're a perfect example of an entrepreneur that wants something (or someONE) for nothing...or CLOSE to nothing. Stop belly-aching, get off your butt and HIRE SOMEONE already, or do as many others LIKE YOU have done when they want indentured servitude from their employees: HIRE SOMEONE FROM INDIA!

It's time for the MEDIA to stop this kind of hack reporting as if they are quoting facts. The REAL FACT is that many employers are quick to lowball salaries, yet when it comes to pricing their products they seem offended when consumers look to the Internet for a better price.

Want a spectacular employee? Offer a decent salary, spend some money and train them yourself! Want your job to stay in the USA? Support your local business when making a purchase instead of buying on the Internet. We're in this together and actions YOU make can have a ripple affect on so many other people. It's important we look at the global impact we all make.

"They just want to throw them out there and see what lands," she says. ... What the hell do you think ??? Who the hell do you think you are ??? Do you think people apply to ONE GODDAMNED JOB? And miraculously it happens to be YOUR STUPID OFFERING? PLEASE go die.

This concept is nauseatingly preposterous. Pick any idiot off the street and they can be coerced into manipulating desktop publishing software and playing shallow office politics.

People do not get hired on skills. They get hired on politics, religion, personality or references from another person the HR knows. People hire people they like and fudge the rest. HR people look at resumes like fourth-graders trying to figure out how to add fractions.

Honestly, this woman is incompetent. I have a master's degree and over ten year's experience writing and editing, and I live in a homeless shelter because no one is granting me job interviews, so I rant out of savings to pay rent. The only times I don't include a cover letter are when I'm doing QuickApply on CareerBuilder so that I have fodder to appease the shelter system or the Department of Labor, both of which put quantity of applications over quality, and I am very rarely granted interviews, even though I use a friend's Manhattan apartment and not the shelter as my mailing address. In fact, usually when I am granted an interview, it's from one of these QuickApply positions, such that I'm not even really prepared for the interview the way that I am when I write a targeted cover letter.

Wow, are you serious? Masters degree and 10 years exp in writing and editing and forced to live in a shelter? Has it really gotten that bad out there? I'm very underemployed, having come from a mid-level executive position in Socal, losing the house and everything when the wife and I were laid off within 3 months of each other, way back in 2007. I've been on active duty with the Marine Corps Reserve, have sold a little bit of Life and Health Insurance, driven a truck over the road, and for the past two years + have been stuck in an IT position at weird hours at night, for just over $20/hour, no raises, no reviews, nothing... and have even been laid off from there for three months in the past. I have changed my resume' around trying to get back into Facility Management, have been badgered with calls from Univ of Phoenix when I thought about getting an MBA (not a good idea for a 47 year old, I think), and even figured on spending about $1800 for an IFMA certification.

I was going through my IE history looking for a page and came back across this. OMG! You guys are still going on about this? Get off of it already. Your like beating a dead horse already. Are you that bored not working you have to keep coming back to it? Holy Crap!

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!"The only requirements are a four-year college degree and some writing and editing skills""Yasa's opening is for a junior market analyst at her company, and no work experience is required."How ridiculous can this get? If no work experience is required and you only need 'some' writing and editing skills, why doesn't she just pull in the next high school graduate that she finds? $30,000 sounds like a good match for a high school grad to me.

Perhaps no qualified applicants are applying because the website looks so incredibly amateur: http://www.chemorbis.com

You enter the site and are immediately greeted with an annoying pop-up message, the accordion at the top isn't styled appropriately (letters are overlapping), the videos don't work and the links are misleading, there's a strange folder icon on the top of the home page that apparently does nothing, there is no intuitive way to get back to the home page, the site takes forever to load because there is way too much unnecessary code in the background, and there are no easy-to-find links to any job opportunities.

The irony of this is that this article is one giant advertisement and will probably fetch more applicants that are plenty qualified, but will probably be turned down because they didn't think the business was legitimate.